by Laura Bickle
Lev nodded. “What makes you think . . .” He tried again. “What did Bridget say?”
“About my father? She said that she’d met a man, here, in Temperance. You,” he amended, twiddling this thumbs against the glass. “She said she’d spent the summer here, before leaving for graduate school in California in the fall.”
Lev’s brow wrinkled, plumbing the depths of his memory. “Art? Art history?”
“Yeah. She was a painter.”
“She was quite good.”
“Yeah. She painted everything she saw. There was even a portrait of you that she did from memory, I guess. It hung in my bedroom. She said . . . she wanted me to know that my dad was watching over me.”
“I didn’t know she had a child.”
“She said she asked you to come with her, when she went to grad school. She said . . . you were rooted in place, somehow. That that’s just the way you were. That it was nobody’s fault. She said . . . some people are rocks, and some are wind. She said you were a rock.”
Lev stifled a snort. That sounded like Bridget.
“She was never angry with you. Not a bit. I think she always loved you, and that you not being there with us was just . . . a fact of life. Nothing to resent or rail against, you know?”
“And you? Were you angry?”
Archer shook his head. “Why would I be? I mean, without you, I wouldn’t be here, right?”
Lev’s guts softened a touch. The young man had a good soul. So did his mother, never having poisoned him against Lev. This was not a disaster.
“Is your mom doing well?”
“Yeah. She teaches art at a high school now, and has her paintings in shows every so often. She really likes what she does. I mean, we moved around a lot, but I got to see a lot of cool places. Albuquerque, Vashon Island, Denver. I think she always liked it best where there was a cool arts community, you know?”
“What made her tell you now . . . where I was?” Lev still had a tickle of skepticism in his mind. “And what made you start looking?”
Archer stared into his drink. That was the great thing about bars—they gave people scrying mirrors to peer into, in their glasses. It was difficult to lie under the influence of those liquid oracles. “Weird stuff started happening.”
“Weird like . . . how?”
Archer rubbed his temple. “Look. I’m not crazy, okay?”
“Never said you were.”
“I started hearing voices a couple years ago.” Archer looked away. “I looked it up on the internet. I guess it’s a classic sign of schizophrenia. But it’s not like that. It’s not. I’m not talking to myself . . . it’s other people.”
Lev waited for him to continue, but his knuckles were white behind the bar.
“I hid it for a long time, but . . . my mom heard me talking to this old man that lived in our apartment. Sometimes I even saw him. She took me to a shrink. I got doped up on all kinds of meds . . . but I still heard them. The voices. The—”
“—ghosts,” Lev finished for him. “You kept hearing the ghosts that no one else could hear.”
“Yeah.” The young man’s face relaxed in relief. “Exactly. They’re everywhere . . . on the street, in my apartment, at school . . . most of the time, they go away after a few days.”
Lev nodded. “Human souls that are ready to progress to the next level leave Earth after three days. Unless there’s a problem and they get held back. Then, they can become hauntings, plugged into the energy of people or places. They have to be sent on, pulled out of the fabric of reality . . . kind of like a nettle on your jacket.” He reached out to Archer’s coat, pulled out a nettle, and cast it out on the floor.
“So you believe me?”
“I do.”
“Can . . . can you hear them, too?”
“I can.” Lev took a deep breath. There was no running away from this. Archer was his son. “But there are some things you need to know.”
He pulled a bottle out from beneath the bar, pouring himself a glass of vodka. It tasted like winter, bright and clear. He never drank on the clock, but this was beyond such mundane concerns.
“You can control it,” he began. “You can shut them up . . . shut them out.” He decided to take the easiest road first. Ease the young man into the strangeness he’d inherited.
“Show me,” Archer demanded. “Please.”
Lev took a breath and dropped his shoulders. He shut his eyes and gestured for the young man to do the same.
“What do you hear?” he asked.
“I hear . . . tapping. Whispers. Singing. Faint. Like . . . Ick.”
Lev heard Wilma giggle. He opened one eye. Wilma was trying to kiss the young man on the cheek, while Father Caleb was pulling her back. Archer still had his eyes closed, but he was rubbing the side of his face.
Lev pointed with two fingers at the ghosts, then upstairs to the attic. Wilma rolled her eyes, and Caleb stuck his lower lip out. But they vanished.
Lev cleared his throat. “Good. Those are the ghosts of the Compostela. There are a couple still here, as this place is very old.”
Wilma giggled from upstairs and there was a thump.
“For Christ’s sake, woman! Let them talk.”
Lev continued. “The ones still here are mostly harmless. Think of them like squirrels in the attic.”
“Okay. Squirrels. Making noises.”
“Good. Take a deep breath and drop your awareness into your chest. Are you there?”
“I think so.”
“It’s dark and quiet here. You don’t have to perceive everything through your head, your ears and your eyes. Now imagine that . . . you are surrounded in a suit of armor made of lead. And there’s a helmet for that armor. It’s impermeable. Nothing gets through it unless you allow it. It feels heavy, and still. And safe. A vault.”
He heard Archer’s breath echoing shallowly, then it slowed, softened.
“Do you still hear them?”
“No . . . not nearly as loud as before. They’re very distant.”
“Good. It will get better, but that will come with practice. You can open your eyes.” Lev looked at the young man. “After practice, you won’t be able to hear them at all. Or see them. Or even smell them.”
“Wow.” The young man nodded. “I mean, I tried meditation and things . . . but all that stuff seemed to really focus on opening up my chakras and stuff. And thinking about clouds.”
Lev snorted. “The last thing you need is to open up your chakras. Or whatever they call your ethereal body these days.” He dug into his pocket for a jagged black stone. “Here.” He extended a piece of obsidian to his son in his open palm. His son. It still felt odd to contemplate.
Archer took it. “What is it?”
“Obsidian. To help you visualize it, at least until it becomes second nature.”
“Will you teach me?” Archer’s hand closed around the sharp stone.
“I have to,” Lev said quietly. “Or else you’ll be batshit by the time you’re thirty.”
The young man looked crestfallen.
“And I want to,” Lev amended. “It’s just . . . I hadn’t expected this to happen. I didn’t think I could have children.” That was true. An over-simplification, but true.
Archer seemed to relax a bit at that admission. “I know that you didn’t know.”
Lev stared at his reflection in the bar top. “And there’s a whole lot that you don’t know. That you may not want to. You’ll have to decide how much you want to know . . . how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. I can teach you some tricks about how to shut up the dead, and you can lead a pretty normal life.”
Archer looked him square in the eye. His eyes were like Lev’s, only with a dark rim of grey around the irises, like Bridget’s. “I want to know it. I want to know it all. Like . . . when you said that the ghosts could be gotten rid of”—he glanced down at where the nettle had been plucked from his shoulder—“why don’t you kick them out of here, go all Ghostbusters on
that shit?”
“Because these ghosts mean no one any harm. They’re on their own trajectory toward the light, in their own time. It’s not worth wasting the magic it would take to speed that up.” He gazed upstairs, at the attic. He knew they were listening. One of them huffed.
The pair of them materialized, sitting on a rafter in the open part of the ceiling, like birds. Wilma held her finger to her lips, as if she was promising to be quiet.
“Magic? There’s magic? What about magic?” Archer was unaware of them.
“In time. For now . . .” Lev came out from behind the bar and pulled up a stool. “Tell me about your life.”
The young man began to speak, haltingly at first, then more rapidly. He spoke of mundane things, of school and his childhood. He had a dog named Sydney growing up. He talked about Christmas trees and seeing his grandparents on the East Coast and learning to play guitar. He talked about his love of the outdoors and how he thought he would want to go to school to be a park ranger. He’d broken up with his first girlfriend just a few months ago, without acrimony, since she was going to college in Europe. He hoped they could still stay friends. He had just learned to drive a stick shift, and was kind of curious about restoring classic cars. There was a garage down the street from his mom’s place that did that, and he was thinking about applying for a summer job there, taking a gap year.
They talked until the sun moved from the stained glass and the light grew dim.
Lev listened to him and not the ghosts in the rafters, and it was perhaps the best conversation he’d had in twenty years.
No one really wanted to see their father in the nursing home.
It wasn’t to say that Petra wasn’t used to it. In the time she’d moved to Temperance and found her father, she’d gone weekly to see him. He had his good days and his bad days. On his good days, he was very much like the man she remembered from her early childhood: quick, fun, with an easy laugh and still trying to pull quarters from behind her ears. He liked to play chess and checkers and make fun of daytime television. On his bad days, though, he was a stranger: a raving alchemist, lost in his own delusions. He’d go wandering somewhere in his own head or the spirit world, and forget to come back for dinner. He’d mutter about lead and mercury and bitch about where he’d left his crucible, which more often than not wound up just being a foam cup on his bedside full of green peas that he’d left there to rot.
She hadn’t seen her father in weeks. Mike had been right; she needed to see him. She just didn’t know which father she’d get today. More than anything, she hoped that it was the father she remembered from her childhood. She wasn’t sure she could deal with Alchemist Dad in her current state.
She had let Maria fuss over her, letting the other woman dress her again: dark leggings, tall boots, and a tunic. Thankfully, the tunic was soft on her seeping stitches. She’d even let Maria fluff a bit of rouge on her face, to make her look a bit more lifelike. Petra couldn’t care less for artifice at this time, but she admitted that she didn’t want her father to worry any more than he had to. And he was going to.
Like Maria was. Maria had driven her to the nursing home. “You don’t get to run,” she said.
Petra rolled her eyes.
“I’ll wait in the lobby,” Maria said.
Petra waited until Maria’s skirts had swished around the corner. She moved down the hall and paused before her father’s door. She knocked, a soft, reluctant rap.
Her father was sitting in his wheelchair, working what looked like a child’s cardboard puzzle. Her heart sank. She wouldn’t be getting her favorite father today.
But he looked up at the door, squinted at her.
“I can almost see through you,” he said.
She came to him and bent to give him a hug, mindful to keep her sore side out of his reach. She sat in the visitor chair, opposite him.
“How are you doing, Dad?”
Her father’s fingers stilled on the puzzle pieces. He lifted one liver-spotted hand and pointed at her. “You look like hell.”
“Yeah. I know, Dad. I stopped the chemo. I’m just gonna . . . wait.” There. That sounded softer, somehow.
“No.” He almost lurched out of his chair, and she rushed to catch him. “You can’t do that.”
She poured his liver-spotted hide back into his chair and tucked his blanket around his spindly legs. “Dad. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” His lower lip quivered. “You have to fight.”
“I’m fighting another fight,” she said, grasping at straws. “I’m looking for Gabe. Have you seen him . . . in the spirit world?”
His eyes were glazed. Whether it was from dementia or drugs, she couldn’t tell. “There are too many eagles out there.”
“Where have you seen the eagle?” she demanded.
He made a dismissive gesture. “Flying around light bulbs like moths. They keep smacking themselves to pieces, burning themselves. Don’t concern yourself with birds.”
She reached out to take his hand. “Dad. Where are the birds?”
Gabe had told her that the eagle was a symbol of renewal, of released spirit. He’d now taken that shape in the spirit world. She suspected that he had evolved beyond the raven, was moving into another form beyond her reach. Now, she wasn’t so certain.
He shifted away from her. “Leave the birds alone. Go back to the hospital.” His jaw was set, and he would say no more.
She sat with him for an hour, in stubborn silence. At the end of visiting hours, she stood and kissed him on his balding forehead.
“I love you, Dad. Bye.”
But he would not say goodbye to her, just stared at her with palpable fury as she left. She felt his gaze heavy on her back.
But she was past expectation, past his anger.
She met Maria in the lobby. Her friend was flipping through a six-month-old magazine on sailboats.
“Did it go okay?” she asked, brow creasing.
“No. But that’s all right.”
She had the sneaking feeling that things were never going to be okay, that she’d never get closure, that she’d step off this mortal coil like a ball of loose yarn and no anchor, just rolling off the table and bouncing to the dark floor beyond.
She was losing.
Chapter 9
The Shallows
The feel of sun on her face was glorious.
Muirenn drifted in the shallows among the cattails, letting the sun warm her speckled face. She noticed that it had been driving some of the green tint from her skin, and it was pinking a bit underneath. Muirenn dimly recalled what it was like to have a sunburn. Judging by the position of the sun, she guessed that it was months past the spring equinox now, likely late June. Her fingers twisted in the reeds, stroking the long fronds. It had been such a long time since she’d been near anything that really lived, beyond the unlucky fish that had wandered in her domain.
She was truly sick of eating fish. She’d had 150 years of eating those pale, eel-like creatures that meandered into her dark current. As she reveled in the sun, she licked pollen that was just beginning to form on the cattails and scooped bits of algae around the rocks. She caught a frog and devoured it in two bites, savoring the twitching as it came down her throat. It tasted like sun and life. She hadn’t realized how malnourished she’d been, just lurking in the dark, trying to survive on cold water and frightened fish. She’d grown weak. Her fingers traced the spaces between her ribs, lingered over her plumping belly. She wanted to eat everything she saw, but she had to be careful not to be seen. Some things, like frogs and cattails and grass, were the same as she remembered. The rest of the world had moved forward without her, and she knew little about it. What place might she have in it? She didn’t know yet. All she knew was that she had to gather her strength. Eat. Think. Digest. Then act.
She ventured farther downstream than she had before. Meadows surrounded the creek, as the water deepened. Elk and bison dotted the fields. At least that was the same. But strang
e things flew overhead. She watched them, how their wings didn’t move. They left behind white streaks of clouds, like chalk on the deep blue sky.
Something shiny caught her attention downstream: a glint, like a mirror. She slid below the water and approached it from below, allowing the shape to blot out the sun. A boat. Not like the wooden boats she recalled from her time as a woman, but one made of metal. She pressed her hand to its cool hull. She felt vibration in it, the scrape of movement. Something was in it.
Food. Food was in it.
She floated in the water below the boat, listening with her palms pressed against its cool skin. Her hands followed the shuffle of movement, the scraping of a box, muttering. There was one person in this boat, she decided. That was an acceptable risk.
She waited until the person above kicked around a bit and cast a fishing line into the water. She gazed dispassionately at the hook and shiny lure falling past her shoulder. She had no more interest in fish. She wanted to eat something warm-blooded that would warm her own blood and belly.
The man above—she was convinced by the slosh of water against the small boat that it had to be a man—stretched out. The boat creaked and shifted, and she had a sense of the weight redistributing. She waited until he was still. It may have taken minutes, or an hour. She’d lost track of the ability to tell time well, deprived by the sun and stars for as long as she had been.
She slowly pushed water from her lungs and pulled herself to the surface. She peered over the prow of the boat.
She was right: a man lay in the boat, a hat pressed over his face to protect him from the sun. His hands were clasped over his belly, and he snored softly against the brim of the hat, gently moving the edge of it. He was a middle-aged man, a little soft around the gut, but the muscles of his arms were likely well-marbled. They were covered with symbols and letters, like drawings on paper. She squinted at them, trying to decide if these decorations meant that the man wasn’t good to eat, if the ink was permanent and had seeped into his flesh. She remembered that she once had eaten a trout that was sick. She’d had nothing else to eat and had risked it. The fish had made her vomit for days, until she was certain she would die. From that time on, she vowed that she would rather starve than eat poison.